In the old world, product strategies were simple. Products were limited to books, articles, whitepapers, and for some, seminars and keynote presentations. Today, the products include these traditional media but add to this list, destination sites, webinars, teleconferences, professional blogs, online training modules, social media, and new mobile products emerging even as you read this. The wide variety of media and distribution channels available today requires that you create a strategy to define the exact products you want to create. Each product needs to be defined in terms of purpose (marketing, education, training, edutainment), content (subjects/issues), scope (how long, how much detail) and how it fits into your overall production process. For example, you may write a blog as a way to gather content for a book or a seminar. Blogs are a particularly attractive way to get feedback from your audience in order to test out new ideas and information because blogs allow your audience to comment directly about your content. If you don’t actively follow the comments your readers leave on your blog you are missing the biggest opportunity you have for vetting content. Moreover, you can also use comments to help you create new content. You can do that by simply being more aware of what your audience knows and doesn’t know; what they want to know; what they should know but don’t know they don’t know; and even letting them teach you a thing or two.
In some cases, professional blogging is really more about sharing information that teaching others. Many professional blogs are little more than opinion channels where the blogger is no better informed than the audience. There is nothing wrong with this but as a subject matter expert you should be careful about how you define yourself for your audience. If you spend all your time reflecting on cutting edge issues and discussing what the future is going to bring in your industry segment then you can easily fail to establish your own expertise and your reputation with your audience as a true, subject matter expert. As a subject matter expert you should keep at least 60% or more of your blog posts focused on information that is not speculative but remains grounded in proven knowledge and real information that your audience is seeking.
Whatever the medium or format (book, journal, blog, etc.) always take the time to define the purpose of your communication. In some formats, like blogs, the purpose can change from day to day or week to week. In others, like books and seminars, you should be very clear about the purpose. Purposes can include: marketing yourself or other content you create; educating or training on specific topics; entertaining or that new hybrid, edutainment; or simply serve to direct your audience to other points in your distribution scheme.
In the old world, distribution schemes were quite simple. There were not a lot of choices to be made. Books were handled through publishers, it you were lucking enough to get one. Articles and whitepapers were distributed through professional journals if you could get them published. Speaking opportunities were even rarer. Today, all of these options and many more are on the table. Direct publishing is now a viable alternative to professional publishing houses. It is quite possible to build your own audience. In fact, most professional publishing houses only look for authors who bring with them a readymade audience. So even if your goal is to grow your career to that level, you cannot ignore the need to build an audience, largely through your own efforts.
That is why developing a distribution scheme is so important. Doing this well means that you think through how you will reach your audience, through which mediums, with content designed to move your audience deeper into your content. Decisions about monetizing your content should remain fairly simple. Books and seminars where you appear in person should be paid for. Otherwise, most of your content should be free. That’s because all content now has to compete for attention in a universe filled with free content. If you are going to charge for content you have to provide an overwhelming value. That means providing information and education that is not freely available. Books are easier to monetize because the price points are lower than seminars but a book should contain just as much value or you will disappoint your readers. Seminars must win over virtually every participant so that they go away telling their fiends what a good deal it was, regardless of the price.
Here’s how a typical distribution scheme should work with the tools available today. First, you will want to have a web site which will be the hub of all your communications. Web site analytics (in most cases just using Google Analytics) allows you to easily track and monitor traffic at your own site. For this reason alone, it’s important that you have your own site. From this central hub, you should connect to all the other forms of media available to you. This includes registration systems for online webinars or teleconferences, connections to all your key social network sites (Facebook, Linkedin, The Expert Knowledge Network, and possibly Twitter), links to an on demand publishing system for books and whitepapers (such as Lulu); links to all your strategic content partners; and links to additional resources to which you can help connect your audience.
[NOTE: The Expert Knowledge Network includes links to Yugma for online webinars and Lulu on-demand publishing and also provides a central blog which can be redistributed to other blog sites.]
With this structure in place, you can now begin thinking strategically about how to create and distribute content with the goal of driving traffic into and back out of the central hub, your web site. Always look for opportunities to distribute your content through other distribution channels. Professional blogs are always on the lookout of guest bloggers so seek out and maximize these opportunities. You should also re-distribute your blogs to free distribution outlets whenever possible. The more these channels are aligned with or target your own area of expertise the better.
Also be sure to use a wide variety of mediums in your distribution strategy. You may not want to produce a whitepaper very often and books even less often than whitepapers but a good minimum goal is to do one whitepaper per year and one book every two to three years. You can do whitepapers more often, particularly if they essentially provide the content for your book. Of course, a good blog strategy will produce plenty of content for both whitepapers and books. The key is to have a plan in place for intentionally creating the content you need. This simply requires that you make a detailed outline and use it to guide your production of content for your blogs.
If you do seminars or workshops, you can use this same strategy for producing content as well. While you should always hold back certain information behind a pay door, many authors hold back too much. You can give away most of your content for several reasons. First, when giving away content through articles, whitepapers, blogs, webinars, etc., you are distributing it in such a piecemeal fashion that much of the overall value will not be perceived. That perception will only be created when the content is assembled and delivered in a single event, either as a book, a seminar or workshop. Second, when your audience actually crosses the pay threshold, even if you have only held back 20% of your content, the perceived value will be enhanced by the big picture view you can paint whenever you present your content packaged up in a single user experience. Remember that your most ardent fans will always be looking for that big picture vision and you can only give that to them in a high end product that is worth paying for in the first place.
Your pricing strategy should be simple and in line with competitive products. Books have a narrow price range. Lower price points mean higher sales so it’s better to lean toward lower price points when pricing your books. This is especially true if you book is not the end product but only a means to and end: either helping you build your brand so that you can sell consulting services; or a lead in to more valuable products such as seminars or workshops. One exception to this rule applies if you create a workbook for a workshop. In that case you can charge a much higher price for the workbook. This is just a matter of creative marketing since everyone will have to pay for both the workbook and the workshop but pricing the workbook separately increases the perceived value. That’s not to say that perceived value and real value should not be equivalent. The challenge is usually in the direction of having to prove the value of all your products. Perceived value is almost always lower than real value when it comes to content you create. That assumes that it has real value to begin with but in most cases, you have to sell the value of your content before it is purchased and even more importantly, during and after it is consumed. In the case of a book, that task is achieved by the content alone. In the case of a seminar or workshop, that task falls to you and your ability to connect to your audience and help them overcome the challenges and struggles they face.
Once you have a complete distribution strategy in place that connects you to the infrastructure necessary for reaching all the distribution channels you wish to use and established a clear idea about the types of mediums you will use (including their purpose and content), you will have already defined a sale process that includes all these efforts. You can enhance that sales process through a creative marketing strategy but for the most part, sales will occur as a natural result of marrying your distribution strategy to your marketing strategy.
Check this category for more blogs about how to develop smart project strategies for marketing your expertise.
